Hello folks…
Time for a fun & useful survey. This time lets talk about Excel Interview Questions.
Many of you are silently becoming awesome in Excel, data analysis, charting, dashboard reporting, VBA, Power Pivot and business skills, thanks to all the time you spend on Chandoo.org. I am sure there will be a day in near future, when you have to face another interview and be selected for a challenging, fun & high paying role.
Likewise, there is also a significant portion of you who are too good in your job that you will become a senior manager, VP or CXO, or better still start your own business. When the tables have turned, you will be the one looking for smart, dedicated, talented and fun individuals to join your team and make you look even more awesome.
So my question for both prospective interviewees and wannabe Excel pros,
According to you, what are the best Excel interview questions?
I will go first.
My top 5 Excel interview questions
Assuming I am looking for an analyst who can take any data dumped at her and turn it in to insights, actionable statements or management summaries, I will ask her below questions for sure.
- How do you lookup particular items from a large data set? Discuss various approaches, why they work, where they fail using this example data set.
- Can you make this ugly, confusing model in to usable, simple & elegant one?
- Assuming you have sales data of various products in several regions over the last 36 months, what kind of charts you prepare to help us understand what is going on and where we should focus?
- Can you analyze the same sales data using pivot tables. Can you compare pivot analysis with formula approach and comment?
- How well do you know about our business? Can you create a high level model of how we make money in Excel? After I explain how we make money in words of course.
- Bonus question: Which resources you use to keep yourself ahead of others in this position. (websites, books, training programs etc.)
What about you?
Go ahead and share your best interview questions. Use your experience as an interviewer or interviewee. Click below link.
Take up Excel interview questions survey.
Have an interview coming up soon?
Then brush up your skills. Start with these pages and let your curiosity go wild.
11 Responses to “Fix Incorrect Percentages with this Paste-Special Trick”
I've just taught yesterday to a colleague of mine how to convert amounts in local currency into another by pasting special the ROE.
great thing to know !!!
Chandoo - this is such a great trick and helps save time. If you don't use this shortcut, you have to take can create a formula where =(ref cell /100), copy that all the way down, covert it to a percentage and then copy/paste values to the original column. This does it all much faster. Nice job!
I was just asking peers yesterday if anyone know if an easy way to do this, I've been editing each cell and adding a % manually vs setting the cell to Percentage for months and just finally reached my wits end. What perfect timing! Thanks, great tip!
If it's just appearance you care about, another alternative is to use this custom number format:
0"%"
By adding the percent sign in quotes, it gets treated as text and won't do what you warned about here: "You can not just format the cells to % format either, excel shows 23 as 2300% then."
Dear Jon S. You are the reason I love the internet. 3 year old comments making my life easier.
Thank you.
Here is a quicker protocol.
Enter 10000% into the extra cell, copy this cell, select the range you need to convert to percentages, and use paste special > divide. Since the Paste > All option is selected, it not only divides by 10000% (i.e. 100), it also applies the % format to the cells being pasted on.
@Martin: That is another very good use of Divide / Multiply operations.
@Tony, @Jody: Thank you 🙂
@Jon S: Good one...
@Jon... now why didnt I think of that.. Excellent
Thank You so much. it is really helped me.
Big help...Thanks
Thanks. That really saved me a lot of time!
Is Show Formulas is turned on in the Formula Ribbon, it will stay in decimal form until that is turned off. Drove me batty for an hour until I just figured it out.